Audio samples

Notes

Created by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson,
Einstein on the Beach was premiered at the 1976 Avignon Festival
and revolutionized once and for all our concept of opera. A key work of
the 20th century.

The characters

It is difficult to talk about "characters" in this very unusual
opera for its course is centred on the evolution and circumvolutions of
musical themes which divide and close up gain, and the least variation
which takes on, through repetition, monumental proportions. It is not clear
if Einstein is a witness of the spectacle or if the spectacle exists only
in his mind, but around his character gravitate numbers and words, sometimes
simple musical notes which when repeated have a hypnotic power and can
attain the character of an invocation. Extracts from radio broadcasts,
little superimposed texts, add to the mystery of this dense, profound,
wordless communication. The human characters, the dancers and actors, clash
with a majestic, unsettling décor: a dark, smoking train, a courtroom
dominated by a clock... so many elements which stifle the human presence
and make it more precarious.

The story

There is no plot properly speaking, but an interwoven web of music and
image. Three principal themes - the train, the trial and the space-ship
- are carried from act to act and developed with visual and aural variations.
These inflected themes are introduced around "Knee plays", which
are in fact articulating points (as in the knee-joint). In these knee plays
the main performer is a violinist representing Einstein, placed halfway
between the stage action and the audience.

The stage movement is conditioned by the music and the décor.
The theme of the, Train is marked by a rapid rhythm, reprised in Night
Train, which itself becomes Building. The Trial empties out its chorus
of jurors to become Prison (A.III, Sc.1).The Dances take place against
a distant image of a spaceship, which gets nearer in Act III. The last
dance takes place inside the vessel (A.IV, Sc.1). The Bed finally rises
in a vertical position until it disappears at the top of the stage.

That words cannot say...

The result of a collaboration between Robert Wilson and Philip Glass,
Einstein on the Beach seemed at the time of its premiere like a
complete break with all genres known to date. It remains, in the composer's
career, a work apart, a high point of his researches in the field of contemporary
music. It consists of the combination of two procedures: the additive process
and cyclical structure. The additive process consists of motifs of a few
notes which little by little assume scale by successive additions. Cyclical
structure plays on the repetition of two different rhythms which are superimposed
until the initial combination comes back again. This music fuses with the
décors imagined by Wilson to form an atmosphere "of disquieting
strangeness". The plot concerns Einstein, the humanist, scientist
and musical amateur, a key personality of the 20th century through his
theory of relativity, and one of the fathers of atomic fission. Are we
seeing one of Einstein's dreams? Do the present and past mingle in these
voices which psalmodize numbers and radio programmes - or else are we witnesses
to the birth of a theory which leads to a holocaust (the spaceship)? Just
as architecture is the fruit of geometry, so music here re-establishes
its link with arithmetic, and seems to discover this silent communication
founded on concepts inexpressible otherwise than by mathematical formulas,
and through sentiments which only pure emotion can fathom...